Short-distance wireless communications, which can often provide extremely high data rate over several hundred Mbps, is set to become a key enabling technology for many exciting applications in the very near future. With the available high data rate, short range communication devices will offer ease of use of many consumer electronic devices by eliminating the need for the cumbersome interconnecting cables under various scenarios. Typical emerging applications based on short range high speed communications includes wireless HDMI, wireless USB, wireless printing, device-to-device communications, machine to machine communications, small cell communications etc.
However, most emerging short range wireless applications rely on high speed communications. For instance, video streaming of raw decompressed HD video may need a data rate of around 1 Gbs. Such high data rates significantly increase the complexity and cost of wireless transceivers designed using traditional technologies. The high cost of the user devices will eventually limit the potential applications of short range wireless communication, mainly due to the existence of the competing wired solutions for short range communications (i.e., various cabling technologies). In conjunction with the increasing complexity of high speed user devices, most short range applications often feature a host device with fast computing capabilities, for example a computer.
Existing solutions for short range wireless communications technologies and their corresponding standards are characterized by the following difficulties:
1) Symmetrical design for master (host) and slave devices (user devices). Such a symmetrical design approach drastically increases the unit price of the user device. This is because of the complex and high speed digital signal processing algorithms for channel equalization, compensation and synchronization needed on the user device to support the high speed communications. At the same time, the precision of the digital signal processing modules needs to be very high due to weak signal strengths. The weak signal strength stems from low transmission power in unlicensed broadband communications.
2) The extremely high data rate (>1 Gbps) and the signal processing needed to support such high rates also tend to increase the power consumption and the die area of the user devices. Unfortunately, these current user devices are also reliant on battery power supplies with a limited capacity. The battery requirements will significantly increase the size and weight of the wireless user devices using conventional designs.
3) The complex network protocol for existing short range wireless communications also needs a DSP processor to handle the upper layer interactions and resource management. This further increases the cost of the user devices.
Within many consumer electronics applications, the signal processing capabilities of the devices using the short range communications are not symmetrical. As an example, a desktop computer may be used as a host of the short range communications. This desktop computer can have much a faster processing speed than a user device, for example a camera equipped with a wireless USB interface for data transfers. Due to the extremely high transmission rates (e.g. over several hundred Mbps) required by multimedia applications, implementing a symmetrical design approach for consumer electronics products will significantly increase the cost of such devices and will correspondingly reduce their technology competitiveness.
Hosts for short range communications (e.g. a desktop computer) are often used as a hub (server) for many short range wireless user devices. For instance, a desktop computer can be used to interact with many different short range wireless devices, such as a HD video streaming or data exchange with a printer/camera. To render the costs affordable to the consumer for such technologies, reducing the implementation cost of the mobile devices would by very important. Such lowering of implementation costs can stimulate and help the growth and development of this emerging market.
There is therefore a need for methods and systems which mitigate if not overcome the issues associated with the prior art. Technologies which can lower implementation costs for short range, high speed wireless communications between devices are therefore desired.